Mr B

You gave me your name before the mystery surrounding the same had even managed to form swells of warm air in an otherwise stable breeze.  Or rather, you didn’t.  I clocked it on your button badge, in bold dark grey capitals. Much later, you introduced me to your family, to your life. But it is only now, you reveal yourself fully.

Just say it. Anyone would think it a leap into the Cayman Trough. But then I know more than anyone what you’ve been through. And for a while, I shared intimately in this, your untold disquietude.

                                                *

You opened up first about your Nan. She was funny, you told me. And when we were comfortable, you even invited me to ‘listen in’:

“Jersey Royals are scrapers. Well, anyone will tell you that! But these royals came from Jersey and guess what? They’re not scrapers. Well, I was straight on the phone for a refund. ‘Mrs Bates,’ said the man, ‘we will send you out more potatoes right away, please don’t worry about a thing.’ And he took down all my particulars. Well, that was a whole week ago now, doll.”

Your nan, bless her, tells you everything. But like politicians, words flow and you’re not always the wiser. You never get a word in. On the weekly call we listened to on the couch, our heads against the receiver, our bodies entwined like ribbon weaved around the maypole, your nan was clearly having problems with her online shopping. The week before it had been ‘tins of hoops’. ‘They’ve run out of them everywhere,’ you told me she’d complained. ‘Ever since they started putting them on potatoes just before the weather.’ What she meant by this was that some brand or other of tinned spaghetti sponsors the local weather, the start of each feature including a shot of the slippery ellipsoidal wheat-based staple, swimming in sauce, poured seductively over fluffy baked spud.  The country was going mad for hoops.

The other thing about your nan: she calls you doll.    

Your name, I notice now, can neither be readily protracted nor shortened. Joel is a terse designation, comprising a single diphthong – Joel. Or possibly Jo-el is two monophthongs? Oh, I confuse myself.  The main thing, the pronunciation remains largely the same. Not much room for variation.

Joel. It is a solid name. 

And yet the fight to be called by your first name was silent and, by now, forgotten. Though I remember it well. Because even though you are only seven years older than me, my story is nothing similar.

It goes back to your years in secondary school.

“YOU boy!” was how one of your old school masters addressed you. Colonel Bellingham. An actual colonel.  Made me laugh when you told me about your super strict teachers, when we compared our high school experiences. The thought of you as a mere sprat, dilated eyes, a halo of fat reserves around the middle, no backbone. Too young, thank goodness, to experience corporal punishment, but a single-sex grammar school education was clearly gruelling for you. Following a rather impressive passing of the selection exam – though you never described it in such terms– separating you, academically, from the chaff, your reward was not something you’d much relished… total depersonalisation. No civilised human being, you eventually concluded, would refer to any adult merely as YOU, nor a child in the present time. You were, it quickly became clear to me, an unwilling participant in the very last wave of secondary education where this was still OK; to treat young people like fodder, out of some stylised or systematised culture of ‘discipline’. Of course, ‘boy’ is problematic now too – for a whole host of different reasons. Indeed, all-boy and all-girl grammar schools in the UK will some time soon cease to exist altogether. 

But I know you weren’t happy at school, being referred to only ever by your surname was demoralising. How could you have known then, as a boy of 14, that you were a patronymic match for one of the greatest English writers during World War II – H.E. Bates. The sex-sopped adolescent, before said energy is channelled, is far from literary. Bates, instead for you, merely an unforeseen augury. You were bullied often. They called you bater. As in mastur-bater. How original. But you survived. And it made you tougher. 

Tenderness, though, is by no means alien to you. The opposite in fact. A boy’s school made you appreciate women. It sculpted you into the gentlest of souls. ‘You’re a Useless Eustace’, you told me, a few weeks after we met working at the local supermarket. You weren’t being flirty, just friendly. You were a supervisor by then, while I sold cigarettes at the kiosk and you were kidding around because I kept getting the till roll jammed in the machine-thingy.  And I loved this because it meant you’d singled me out for light raillery as against all the other checkout girls, older, long legs and brimming confidence. We had lunch together in the canteen and sometimes, after work, you took me to the pub even though I was only just eighteen. This, before the implementation of Task 21.

Over time we got close, though, to my greater frustration, we never so much as pecked on the cheek. 

Eventually, you left the supermarket and got a job in the city. A highfalutin office job managing big accounts, which you hated. It was a senior position and you didn’t relish telling others what to do. But it was there you met Lesa. She made you happy. She called you ‘Joey’. Joey for fuck sake! But you loved her. So much so that it was her and not me you took to your brother’s wedding. You loved showing her off to your friends and family. Your brother had this sort of kiosk erected where couples could take creative photos with props, the words on each photo inscribed with ‘Mr & Mrs B’. You put the memorable passport-sized spoils straight up on your fridge, where they remained for far too many years.

But Lesa was not the one for you. You told me later about it at length. She broke your heart when she called it a day, although, frustratingly, you kept up those bloody pictures right up until I’d moved in and had to rip them down myself. Tender though you undoubtedly were, you were also neither spontaneous nor much of a ‘bad boy’. Ever the sentimentalist. She teased you often for being of blue blood and having come from an all boys school which, so she said, ‘explained it all’. Though what it was, in particular, this jocose proclamation was elucidating upon was never…elucidated upon. 

It annoyed me how women you dated thereafter, albeit briefly, denigrated you for being in touch with your– I won’t say feminine but empathetic – side. I had never viewed this as a negative thing. You never had any real problems speaking with women and, although reserved and slow to initiate romantic gestures or make riskier declarations, you were definitely not shy. It’s why I knew you were not a hopeless case. But I knew if I truly wanted you for myself, I would need to take the law into my own hands. I would need to place my move on you. 

Two years ago, we attended a party. It was a reunion party, and you and I came separately. You’d been split with Lesa for over a year now and I looked forward to seeing you so much. You had no idea back then of course, seeing me only as ‘my makeshift little sis’. Still, I held onto hope. That night, I was hopeful beyond all good sense, as if judgement were a bartender serving without a license. Could one version of love not mutate into another? I couldn’t believe the counter to be the chronic truth to underscore all truths. Only, no sooner had I arrived, I saw you over at the bar, speaking to Bianca from Produce and my heart just stopped. What on earth did you see in her, I jealously cursed to myself as I watched her laugh precipitously if not causally at everything you said. I wasn’t sure if you’d just bought her a drink or you’d both been served at similar times and thus had simultaneously full glasses whilst standing together at the bar – but I’d just wanted that sticky carpet of that even stickier venue to roll up with me inside. Tears filling in my eyes, I was just about to leave when you came over. I felt your hand on my shoulder and you asked me if I wanted a drink. “Yes.” I said, “I’d really like that.”

That night, we had sex. Afterwards you felt so guilty. You said you hadn’t intended to take advantage of me. That I was like your ‘non-consanguineous younger sister’. Oh, the irony; your love of labels. Nevertheless, you told me you were attracted to me. You asked if we could stay friends. I nodded. We kissed… I all-too-willingly agreed to embark on a casual relationship.

By this time, I had started my post-grad in psychology. I was studying to be a psychiatrist. I wanted to help people. Though this isn’t about me. It’s not even about us. Sufficed to say, it wasn’t long having commenced my new course, I made my ‘oil of cloves’ decision to move in with you. Glutton for punishment so my friends said, but we were having so much fun, I remained almost entirely distracted from all the underlying pain. You cuddled me in exactly the way I imagined you might; the cocked leg, the neck-kisses. I snatched moments of happiness as if a plastic bucket collecting up fallen atoms.

As most young ‘couples’ do, we spent much of those early months on your couch. And when the phone rang for you, me all the while laying sort of on top of you, sort of on the side of you, I stayed dead in place and rapturously listened in; your nan (doll), your Dad (son), your mum (darling or, occasionally, sweetheart), your mates (‘Joeline’), your myriad underlings at work (Mr. B) – I never referred to you as anything other than Joel. It strikes me, all these months later, that one doesn’t abbreviate the name of a love interest; every syllable is to be treasured, savoured, draw it in while you can. Swallow the air until the aerophagia turns your bleedin’ stomach. 

I met all your family in time, and they loved me. ‘She’s a keeper,’ said your dad which I could tell annoyed you because you never introduced me as ‘my girlfriend’. Your nan, when we went to visit her at the flat off the main road, called me ‘dear’ which was, apparently, quite an achievement for my first ever encounter. I listened dutifully as she discussed bananas from the ‘Waywind’ islands. 

Throughout my attempted integration into your life, into your family, you never embraced me as yours and, as such, I never introduced you to my friends as ‘boyfriend’ or ‘partner’. I told my parents of you but played down our intimacy. You were just a guy I knew from my old job who I was now living with. Perhaps it was my lack of commitment that caused our collapse – these were the obvious and, dare I say, banal first musings – but, over the years, I have learned to stop beating myself up. It’s not you, it’s me: an apposite turn of phrase which, although often disbelieved, in this case, was every bit the chronic truth I’d always dreaded. That trying to contort your affection to fit a hole it was never intended to pass was to depersonalise you much in the same way you’d suffered false identities possibly your entire life.   

It wasn’t me; it was you.

‘I’m so sorry,’ you said a few months into my postgrad course and not long after you were made redundant. Your employer had gone into administration and you were forced to sign on. Letter after letter, Mr Bates, came through the letterbox.  And the wound, although deep for me, I shielded you from. Instead, I told you I understood. That I knew your heart was never really in it. We split up, I packed up my things, but we remained friends. You told me you loved me and, if allowed, always would.

I accepted your love. The form it took. Because I accepted you. I still do. Though now, I am struggling. But you can hardly blame me for that, can you? I mean, today was never going to be easy.

                                                                *

It’s you wedding day. You kindly invited me, as ‘one my closest friends’. Even afforded me a plus one, so I’ve brought Dale who you loosely approve of. Although I note, the two of you have barely ever spoken. Like chalk and cheese is the expression which comes axiomatically to mind. But it’s not this comparison that matters right now…

Your wife. She is so strong, and somewhat striking. Looking at her as she traipses heavily down the aisle like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man; I kid; indelicate yes but she’s not overweight. Bovine, possibly. I can see why you chose her. Emily Cheshire. Managing director of a small start-up and a woman who knows what she wants in life. Her underlings refer to her as Miss C.  Many men would find her confronting. But not everyone. Not you. 

Just say it.

The wedding breakfast was very nice. Your nan didn’t much like the meal, but she says she’s not going to say anything. 

Just say it. 

The speeches were pretty much as you’d expect. Your best man, Nick, calling you Joey throughout. Doing my head in. But you’re laughing plenty. Everyone is laughing plenty. But now, finally, the speech is over. The toast is coming. We are upstanding.

I wince at the prospect of frenetic laughter and applause.

Your man makes the toast and, as his words hit my inner ear, well, I won’t lie Joel, my heart stops. Like I told you it had that night at the reunion. I know you can already hear some in the room gasp for air. Your Nan is certainly looking a bit confused. The aerophagia has set in and turned her stomach. Well, I’m sure she will get over it. 

Just say it. 

We must repeat the words. And, for want of looking jealous or bigoted, I make the split-second decision to join in, strenuously. 

I’m doing this for you Joel. Since the very first moment we met, I hope you know that I’ve always tried to have your best interests at heart. Though perhaps now I’m doing this for me too. To let go like this is not easy but it’s right. You’ll never know how hard the words have been to repeat. And for reasons most will not understand.

Watching you smile and jubilant, immersed in the bosom of all who have loved you, I guess all I can do is wish you well.  So here it goes:

Good luck and be happy. From the bottom of my heart.

Congratulations to you, Mr Cheshire.